Purchasing Compost & Mulch

Residents, landscapers, highway maintenance personnel, farmers, nursery workers, and many others all buy compost and mulch for various applications. There are many outlets to purchase compost and mulch in California.  The most convenient is at your local nursery or home center.  For larger quantity purchases, landscape supply centers, soil blenders or compost and mulch producers can deliver multiple cubic yards of material. To help you locate a compost and mulch facility, the CIWMB maintains a complete and updated compost and mulch producer search tool to locate compost and mulch producers by county.  This search tool will also assist in locating facilities to dispose of organic materials. The search tool will locate facilities and provides a site map and phone number for each facility. We suggest that you call the facility for hours of operation, product availability and price before making a trip. Please note that while you can sort either for compost or mulch facilities, most compost producers will also produce mulch.  As a point of information, not all compost is of the same quality.  There is good compost and not so good compost offered for sale. To help inform potential buyers, the CIWMB provides information designed to assist buyers in assessing product quality.

In addition, State and local government agencies can develop procurement programs that will create new and expanded markets for compost and mulch products. To aid their efforts, the CIWMB has created guidelines for writing compost or mulch procurement specifications. The CIWMB's State Agency Buy Recycled Campaign works with State agencies to increase their procurement of all types of recycled-content products, including compost and mulch.

More Information

Government Compost Program Case Studies

• Avenal State Prison: Food Scrap and Green Material Collection (443-02-016)
• Cal Poly San Luis Obispo: Food Scrap and Green Material (443-02-018)
• City of Burbank: Green Material Collection Program (443-02-017) 
• City of Los Angeles: Green Material and Manure Compost Demonstration Project (443-02-020)
• City of Modesto: Public Compost Production Program Study (443-02-021)
• Folsom State Prison: Food Scraps and Green Material (443-02-019)

Procurement-Related Resource Links

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Guidelines for Writing Compost or Mulch Procurement Specificiations
• Compost/Mulch Source List
• Assessing Product Quality
• State Agency Buy Recycled Campaign
• Recycled-Content Product Database

Related Outside Links

• U.S. Composting Council

Last updated: October 17, 2008